SME’s not taking to VoIP

Small and medium businesses are interested in the new technology of VOIP, but not so much that their interest over comes the pains involved with getting into the market.

The lack of movement by the small business is not a good sign for the VOIP vendors. Small businesses are usually the first to jump on the technology bandwagon, but the VOIP market has too many potential problems – mainly due to the number of vendors involved with basic set up.

New technologies, such as mobile telephony and data, laptops, and mobile computing, have allowed small business to compete in ways that would have been near impossible otherwise. VOIP does offer great advantages to these businesses, including reduced costs, but the market is just too complex.

Because of the numerous pieces involved with VOIP set up, there are lots of opportunities for something to go wrong. It takes much more to fix a problem, which means lots of time consuming trouble shooting. The smaller companies just are not able to do this.

To lure in the small companies, vendors are going to have to find a way to bundle and manage services. The research has shown that small business are 2.5 to three times more interested in VOIP when it is offered through a managed IP telephony and offers site to site VOIP services.

VOIP is the right direction for the small businesses. It’s just that no one is getting it right for them in terms of sales and delivery.